As businesses start to expand their cloud environments, protecting dynamic infrastructure becomes more crucial. In this situation, cloud security alerts can be used to handle important security issues. As soon as a deviation occurs from the expected behavior, these alerts notify the DevOps and security teams.

This article provides guidance on cloud security alerts, covering topics such as identifying the risks of not receiving alerts, trigger points for alerts, understanding the various kinds of alerts and their functions, and putting effective response plans into action with the aid of tools like SanerCloud Alerts.

Risks of Not Receiving Cloud Security Alerts

With cloud configurations and services always changing, failing to have an adequate alerting system leads to misconfigurations going unnoticed, unexpected modifications in crucial files or configurations, suspicious activity going unnoticed, and compliance violations turning into breaches.

By putting cloud security alerting into practice, anomalies, policy violations, and possible threats can be found before they become major incidents.

Trigger Points for Alerts

Alerts are typically triggered based on predetermined rules or conditions that monitor suspicious or risky behavior.

Following are some of the conditions that trigger alerts:

Misconfigured Resources

When a resource in the cloud environment is not securely configured, it triggers this alert.

Typical misconfiguration include:

Open Storage Buckets

A cloud storage service (like AWS S3 or Azure Blob Storage) is publicly accessible without authentication. It could be risky as sensitive data like backups, logs, or PII can be exposed to anyone on the internet.

Overly Permissive IAM Roles

Identity and Access Management (IAM) roles or policies allow broad access like `*:*` for all actions and on all resources. This poses a risk as a compromised user or service can perform unauthorized actions leading to privilege escalation, data leaks, or full environment compromise.

Unauthorized Access Attempts

This alert indicates someone is trying to access your cloud environment or specific resources without proper permissions. This is a key early warning sign of potential compromise or misconfiguration. This alert triggers when the system detects activities like failed login attempts, denied API calls, and access attempts from suspicious locations or devices.

Deviations from Compliance Standards (CIS, NIST, etc.)

Alerts are triggered when your cloud environment violates or drifts away from these standards. These alerts are activated when configurations, permissions, or activities do not align with recognized compliance benchmarks. Examples include, CIS Benchmark Violations, NIST Control Failures, Policy Drift or Configuration Changes.

Unexpected Changes to Critical Files or Configurations

This alert triggers when unauthorized or unexpected modifications are detected in sensitive configuration files or system settings within your cloud environment. These changes could indicate misconfiguration, insider error, or even a compromise in progress.

Use Saner’s Flexible Framework for Effective Alerting

Configure Subscription and Notification Conditions for Saner Cloud Alerts

Saner Cloud Alerts provide users with a flexible framework for Subscription and Notification Conditions, making sure that relevant teams are promptly informed about the security events that are most critical to their operations.

Subscriptions in Cloud Security Alerts enable organizations to customize alerts according to their specific requirements and Notification Conditions for Saner Cloud Tools provide precise control over which events trigger alerts.

Subscriptions in Cloud Security Alerts

Subscriptions allow you to customize and control the alerts you receive, making sure you’re only notified about events that are most relevant to your security operations.

A subscription lets you define alert criteria based on specific tools or use cases within your cloud security platform (e.g., CIEM, CSPA, CSRM). This helps you focus on critical events such as:

• Specific role assignments (e.g., admin or cross-account roles)
• Privileged actions (e.g., changes to IAM policies, deletion of logs)
• Modifications to access permissions or entitlements

With subscriptions, you get alerts only for what matters to your team, avoid being overwhelmed by non-critical alerts, prioritize incidents based on context and relevance, and finally monitor specific events tied to policy or audit needs.

How it Works?

Enable an alert subscription for the tool you want to subscribe to(e.g., CIEM, CSRM, CSPA). Once enabled the alert settings for that tool become editable, where you can customize thresholds, event types, resource scope, or identity types to receive precise notifications. The system then continuously monitors for activity matching your configured criteria and automatically triggers alerts when conditions are met.

By subscribing to Saner Cloud Alerts, you receive alerts only for what matters to your team and monitor specific events tied to policies or your audit needs.

Notification Conditions for Saner Cloud Tools and their Functions

Saner Cloud provides proactive security by triggering alerts based on comprehensive scan results. The system conducts scheduled or on-demand scans to evaluate the configurations, access permissions, and anomalies, aligning them with the defined security policies. When issues such as misconfigurations, emerging vulnerabilities, or unauthorized changes are identified, Saner Cloud promptly generates targeted alerts to help take timely action. Note that neither detection nor alerts trigger for changes introduced and resolved between scans, such as a temporary port exposure. For example, if a critical port is opened at 2:00 PM and closed at 3:00 PM, but the scan runs at 4:00 PM, then the issue is neither identified nor alerted about. This approach ensures that alerts are meaningful, relevant, and actionable, helping you focus on persistent or high-risk issues.

After selecting the conditions and entering the email, clicking the Update  button savesthe subscription preferences and activates alerting.

Cloud Security Asset Exposure(CSAE)

Choose the asset exposure condition that must trigger notifications.

Condition	Function
Newly Created Resources	Notifies when new cloud resources are provisioned
Outdated Resources	Alerts on resources that are deprecated or outdated
Watchlisted Resources	Alerts if flagged or critical resources are involved
Publicly Accessible Resources	Triggers alert when resources become publicly accessible

Cloud Security Posture Management(CSPM)

Choose the compliance conditions that must trigger notifications.

Condition	Function
All compliance checks	Triggers alert for all types of compliance deviations detected by CSPM
Critical and High Severity Checks	Limits alerts to only the most severe or critical compliance failures
Custom Checks	Allows users to manually enter specific CSPM check IDs (comma-separated) that they want to be alerted on. Useful for focusing on controls aligned with specific regulatory or business priorities.

Cloud Identity Entitlement Management(CIEM)

Choose the type of identity or permission-related events that trigger alerts.

Alert Criteria for CIEM is organized into 2 categories namely Checks and Logs.

Condition for Checks	Function
All Compliance Checks	Alerts for all entitlement-related security and policy violations
Users with Excessive Permissions	Detects and alerts when individual user accounts have more permissions than necessary
Roles with Excessive Permissions	Detects and alerts when individual roles have more permissions than necessary
Custom Checks	Entering specific CIEM check IDs (comma-separated) triggers alerts on targeted conditions
Inactive Users	Alerts when users have been idle for a set period but still retain permissions
Groups with Excessive Permissions	Detects and alerts when groups have more permissions than necessary
Policies with Excessive Permissions	Triggers alerts when permission policies allow overly broad or risky actions

Condition for Logs	Function
Critical Log Activities	Triggers alerts for key events in access or permission logs, such as role changes, privilege escalation, or unauthorized access attempts

Cloud Security Posture Anomaly(CSPA)

Choose the alerts related to unusual behavior or deviations in the cloud environment.

Choose the scope of anomaly detection.

Condition for Logs	Function
All Anomalies	Triggers alerts for every detected anomaly, irrespective of the confidence level or severity.
High Confidence Anomalies	Triggers alerts only for anomalies that meet high-certainty thresholds (reduced false positives) such as unauthorized access from unusual location.   For example, Saner Cloud has detected a login attempt to an administrator account from an IP address located in a foreign country that has never been associated with the organization. This login occurred outside of business hours. Furthermore, the same account had just successfully logged in from the corporate network a few minutes earlier. Given that this activity significantly deviates from the user’s typical behavior and involves a privileged account, it meets the criteria for high-certainty anomalous behavior. As a result, the system triggers a high-confidence alert, reducing the likelihood of a false positive.
Custom Detection	Allows input of specific CSPA anomaly IDs (comma-separated)

Cloud Security Remediation Management(CSRM)

Choose the alert notifications related to remediation actions taken in response to cloud security issues.

The configuration conditions are classified into three sections: Detection, Tools, and Response.

Condition	Function
Detection	If the detection condition is “All Issues”, then the system triggers alerts for any remediation-worthy issue, irrespective of the severity
	If the detection condition is “Critical Issues”, then the system restricts alerts to only critical or high-severity findings.
Tools	The tools from which remediation issues are detected. One or more tools can be selected to include different detection sources in the subscription.
Response	Determines the types of remediation outcomes that triggers alerts: All Actions include successful, failed, and ongoing remediationsAll Successful Actions alerts only when remediations are completed successfullyAll Failure Actions alerts only on failed or blocked remediation attempts.Custom Response allows the user to enter specific CSRM IDs (comma-separated) for targeted alerting.

UseCase Examples of How Alerts Work with Watchlists in Saner Cloud

Here are a few examples of how alerts work with watchlists for different scenarios:

Monitoring Elevated Service(or resource) Costs

Consider a scenario where an IT administrator identifies certain cloud services with elevated costs in the organization’s cloud infrastructure. To address this, the administrator creates a watchlist for these services across relevant regions. This approach helps the admin to receive timely alerts and take prompt actions in optimizing the usage, adjust the configurations, or reallocate budgets.

Preventing Unauthorized Resource Creation in a Specific Region with Continuous Monitoring

In this scenario, an IT administrator aims to prevent peers from creating a specific resource in a designated region. The administrator sets up a watchlist with the relevant service and region. The system then monitors for matching activity and triggers an alert if another administrator attempts to create the resource in that region, allowing prompt enforcement of policy or further investigation.

Monitoring Service Limits Per Region Using Watchlists

When an organization enforces a policy that limits the creation of S3 buckets to a maximum of five in the us-west-2 region, the cloud administrator can proactively manage this using a watchlist. The admin creates a watchlist specifying the S3 service and the us-west-2 region.

With this configuration, the system continuously monitors the number of S3 buckets in that region. If a new bucket is created and the total approaches or exceeds the defined limit, an alert is triggered. This alert notifies the administrator, enabling them to take timely preventive action such as blocking further resource creation, adjusting policies,etc.

Distinguishing Watchlist from Groups and Tags in Saner Cloud

While groups, tags, and watchlists, all play key roles in managing cloud resources and security, they serve distinctly different purposes.

Saner Cloud raises the abilities of system administrators by simplifying the classification of resources, which aids in the organization of resources for remediation and patch management tasks. By grouping resources into logical categories, IT administrators gain a clearer understanding of their environment.

In addition to grouping, Saner Cloud offers extensive resource management capabilities through customizable tags. These tags consist of user-defined key-value pairs that allow administrators to classify resources based on specific attributes. This functionality simplifies the processes of searching, identifying, filtering, and managing resources.

Overall, the grouping and tagging features of Saner Cloud empower IT administrators to maintain a structured, organized, and secure environment.

In contrast, Watchlist resources refer to specific cloud assets or services identified for closer monitoring due to their significance, potential vulnerabilities, or critical role in operations. These resources may require special attention because they could present a higher risk or are part of essential infrastructure that must be continuously monitored.

Saner Cloud Watchlist allows you to monitor not only individual resources such as EC2 instances, databases, or storage buckets, but also a variety of services, including Amazon S3, Azure Virtual Machines, and Google Cloud SQL. When you add a service to the watchlist, all resources within that service, such as all S3 buckets, all virtual machines, or all databases get monitored collectively.

For example, if you create a watchlist for the Amazon S3 service in the us-east-1 region, then that watchlist automatically includes all S3 buckets in that region, rather than just one specific bucket. If a new bucket is created or if the settings of an existing bucket get changed, then the watchlist rules and alerts applies to that resource as well.

The key takeaway is that including services in a watchlist provides broader coverage, confirming that new resources under that service are automatically monitored without the need to manually add them one at a time.

Adding resources to a Watchlist enables proactive monitoring and makes sure that any changes or risks associated with these critical resources are addressed promptly.

Go Further

Saner Cloud is a comprehensive solution designed to help organizations effectively manage their cloud operations. Key features of the product include asset exposure, posture management, posture anomaly detection, identity and entitlement management, and remediation management.

Documentation is organized to help you quickly and efficiently find the information you need, whether you’re troubleshooting, learning how to use specific tools, or seeking in-depth knowledge about the product suite.

Discover how Saner Cloud Alerts is designed to achieve your security goals. Schedule your trial today for a more comprehensive experience!